When you have scum working for you and you change the name you still have scum doing the job.

You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

There has always been a clear conflict of interest between MPI, recreational and customary fishers.

MPI is export focused and sees the fishery value in monetary export dollars. There collusion with the Commercial Fishing Industry and Fishing Companies has been atrocious and no matter how many dollars they throw at main stream media to clean up their image, the public won’t believe them anymore.

Look at Seafood NZ with their ‘Bounty” TV series. Must fishers saw it as a con job.

For the new Fisheries NZ Ministry to be effective and to gain public trust the complete staff needs to be changed.

MPI was driven forward by a financial policy mandated to it to double the value of the exports by 2025 by the Key government. Once this rot set in - it became firmly established and saw the demise of Scott, Gallagher and Coleman as their ruses were uncovered and exposed.

This policy was applied to the wild fish harvesters of NZ who had little choice but to discard all caught fish of a lesser value to achieve this goal.

MPI turned a blind eye to the overfishing and under reporting from commercial fishers and the result was a deleted inshore fishery.

Worse still was the fact that MPI was in full legal defence of these unsustainable fishing practices.

It could be that MPI was in breach of its own legislation to provide for recreational and customary fishers. But some smart arse changed the laws so they can continue with their bad behaviour.